It can be hard to look at some of
Hyman Bloom’s best paintings, said
Murray Whyte in The Boston Globe.
Because the Boston-based Latvian
immigrant often painted cadavers
that had been flayed open by medi-
cal examiners, “the mind recoils at
what the eye drinks in, radiant color
swiped in exultant strokes.” Bloom’s
cadaver paintings have always been
controversial: In 1954, protesters in
Buffalo had them removed from a
midcareer retrospective of his work.
But viewer discomfort alone doesn’t explain
why Bloom (1913–2009) faded into obscu-
rity long before his death. Though Jackson
Pollock and Willem de Kooning once
praised him as “the first abstract expres-
sionist,” the shy, limelight-shunning Bloom
rejected that label and set himself outside
the main wave and story of the era by
continuing to produce figurative work. The
MFA’s current show proves he should be
counted among our 20th-century masters.
“That it provokes, stirs, and disturbs only
makes it more compelling.”
The Hull (1952): Finding eternity in an exposed rib cageExhibit of the week
New and noteworthy podcasts
Hyman Bloom:
Matters of Life and Death
Museum of Fine Art, Boston,
through Feb. 23
24 ARTS Review of reviews: Art & Podcasts
Bloom’s cadaver paintings belong in a
long tradition, but their origin was highly
personal, said Sebastian Smee in The
Washington Post. In 1941, a close friend
of his killed herself, and he was asked to
identify the body at a morgue. The experi-
ence “profoundly altered both his inner life
and the trajectory of his art.” He believed
he’d glimpsed, in the way color and life
seem to be restored to bodies under dis-
section, evidence that death was not the
end but a metamorphosis. Two years later
he began visiting morgues and render-ing what he saw there in electrify-
ing jewel tones and thick impasto
strokes. Michelangelo, Leonardo, and
Rembrandt had all studied cadavers to
master human anatomy, but Bloom’s
interest went further. “What really
preoccupied him was the profound
intertwining, the ultimate indivisibility,
of life and death.” Given his Jewish
background, it’s natural to see the
paintings and drawings he produced
across the next dozen or more years
as a response to the Holocaust. In any
case, they comprise “one of the most
extraordinary and disturbingly beauti-
ful bodies of work in American art.”“At times, one could say Bloom’s sym-
bolism becomes too much, but that
seems to me a quibble rather than a fault,”
said John Yau in Hyperallergic.com. Bloom
was essentially a genre painter who pro-
duced still lifes, portraits, and landscapes
that frequently come across as explorations
of the continuum between life and death,
matter and light. “I have no doubt of his
greatness, no matter how unsettling his
work may be. There should be a place in
this world where disquieting visions are
more fully honored,” and “the fact that
Bloom has been rediscovered after years of
neglect is a step in the right direction.”“Playing armchair
sleuth has become
something of a sport,”
said EJ Dickson in
RollingStone.com. But
few amateur investiga-
tors are attempting to
implicate their parents.
In a true-crime podcast “trying its damned-
est” to avoid the genre’s excesses, journal-
ist Josh Dean partners with April Balascio,
who at 40 came to suspect that her father,
Edward Edwards, had murdered at least
two people. Balascio knew him to be a
small-time criminal before she gave a tip
to police that resulted in his confession
and conviction for a 1980 double murder
and three other killings. Balascio’s hunt for
other potential murders is complicated by
the efforts of true-crime zealots to link the
since-deceased Edwards to other murders,
including the Zodiac serial killings. The fas-
cinating result is a look at true-crime inves-
tigation “from the inside out,” said Sarah
Larson in NewYorker.com. Edwards, who
left behind a cache of recordings of his
personal musings, “craved attention and
recognition throughout his long criminal
life.” Now he’s got it.
“Failure needn’t always
spell disaster,” said
Fiona Sturges in the
Financial Times. But
NPR host Lauren Ober
isn’t probing small
stumbles here; she’s
after “the eye-watering
cock-ups that have spelled doom for pow-
erful corporations”—many of them house-
hold names. Whether the brand in question
is Kodak, Toys R Us, or Schlitz beer, “these
are delicious tales of greed, mismanage-
ment, and recrimination, and I can’t get
enough of them.” And the episode about
the 1986 takeover of U-Haul might remind
you of King Lear. Even a company in a
recession-proof industry can self-detonate,
said Wil Williams in AVClub.com. Ober, “a
fantastic and funny host,” takes obvious
pleasure in recounting, across one episode,
how a Canadian conglomerate began gob-
bling up independent funeral homes across
the U.S. before it was outfoxed by a mom-
and-pop operation in Ocean Springs, Miss.
“It’s a story of classic capitalist greed, of
hubris and comeuppance, and a bunch of
caskets, that, no, Ober would really not like
to give a test-drive, thank you.”A murder is only
the entry point to
the compelling story
explored in this new
podcast, said Toby
Ball in NYMag.com.
Twenty years ago,
an Oklahoma man
killed his wife’s ex-boyfriend on the side
of a road. But because both men were
members of the Muscogee (Creek) Nation
and the killing arguably occurred on
reservation land, the defendant’s law-
yers have argued that Oklahoma has no
jurisdiction to convict and execute him.
The case, now before the U.S. Supreme
Court, could result in half the state’s land
being designated as reservation territory,
and “if this sounds dry, rest assured, it’s
not.” The second episode’s sudden shift
into the history of the Muscogee “can be
somewhat disorienting,” said Lars Odland
in PodcastReview.org. Host Rebecca Nagle
expands her inquiry still further—into the
full history of how the U.S. government
has taken land and more from Native
Americans. But that story—the story of an
entire people—is “much more interesting”
than a tale of one murder.The Clearing
(Gimlet/Pineapple Street)
Spectacular Failures
(American Public Media)This Land
(Crooked Media)